Wales and World War One, Robin Barlow, Gomer Press, 2014, 247p, £14-99. ISBN 9781848518858.

Robin Barlow has deliberately set out to provide a different perspective on World War One. His experience was that Wales and the Welsh frequently did not warrant a separate entry in textbooks, being merely treated as a subset of what happened to England and the English, and this book seeks to redress that distortion.

The footnotes confirm the depths of research undertaken, although a bibliography would have been very helpful.

The result of his research is a book which will be of interest to both military and also local historians. He explores the attitude of the Welsh to the War, both immediately but also in the longer term. Statistically, in terms of percentages of the male population, there may have been marginally fewer Welsh soldiers on the Western Front but this has to be set in the context that Welsh colliers and quarrymen were engaged in essential war-related work and therefore they were contributing to the national effort in different ways.

He investigates Lloyd George's advocacy of a Welsh Army Corps and how successful it was in an operational sense. In so doing he identifies its county-based recruitment method and what its leadership had achieved by May 1915. It had issued 1,837,411 articles of personal equipment and uniform at a cost of £372,708 6s and 7d. This included 74,768 jackets and 68,276 pairs of trousers. It is in the midst of statistics such as these that the local dimension begins to emerge: somewhere manufacturers must have been under pressure to achieve this unexpected requirement.

The internal situation in Wales is an important component of this research. It is more than just a comment on the Home Front: it explores the varying attitudes of those who opposed the War, or more specifically war in general, on religious or philosophical grounds; and it reports on the clashes between the pacifists and the self-styled ‘patriots'.  Beyond that it explores the effects of the application of conscription after 1916 and the work of the military service tribunals, revealing that these tribunals were often more reflective of their local communities than has hitherto been suggested. The role of women in the war effort is examined: the Welsh experience mirrors experience elsewhere with women, beyond just nursing care, beginning to work in hitherto male preserves, such as brick-making and agriculture.

This book provides a valuable insight into the life and mind of Welsh people, with their disparate attitudes as elsewhere, and is an important contribution to the World War One commemoration.